It was an election that says volumes about what citizens want in more traditional parts of the country. Apparently tired of what they have had for years, voters turned out more of the same and voted for a new, fresh face.

I haven’t had a chance to look in detail at what Rev. Jeremiah Wright has recently said, but from what I have seen from the front page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal, his recent comments are pretty offensive. It’s pretty ridiculous to say the government started AIDS, or whatever it was he said.

But, regarding his past comments that led up to his “God damn America” finale in the pulpit on YouTube, I personally didn’t see it as too far off the mark to be coming from a black man in America.

The day has finally come: Pennsylvania primary day!

I’m an Obama supporter, but personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass what the outcome is as long as it goes as planned and we don’t have to hear about it any more. I couldn’t believe how much press the Pope’s visit got last week, but at least it meant I didn’t have to listen to HIllary’s campaign throw everything they’ve got at Obama. The closer we can get to the end of the primaries the better. Their are bigger fish to fry in a race with John McCain.

Hillary will likely win, but it will likely not make any difference. Obama will still win the war. Also notable is that even if Hillary loses, it will likely not make any difference, because she will have plenty of excuses why Obama won but she should have - i.e. he outspent her, she’s the underdog, blah blah blah - and she will still continue with her scorched earth campaign policy of not letting any Democrat win if she doesn’t win the election she apparently feels she’s entitled to.

Do we have to keep talking about this? I don’t mean Hillary winning big last night, or Obama losing, but the Democratic race. I mean, seriously, is this still going on? Do we have to keep talking about this? I’m ready to hear something else in the morning when I wake up besides Clinton Obama Obama Clinton Obama Obama Obama Clintion Clinton Obama.

Of course, while I’m getting woolly… uh, weary* over it, I wonder if maybe it’s not good for the Democrats in the long run. McCain is just a side show right now. No one cares about him, it’s all Democrat all the time on the national scene. Blame it whatever conspiracy theroy you want, but it’s true.

From a different angle, I watched Obama’s speech in San Antonio last night, and I wonder, or worry, if this was the pin-prick moment and all the air is about to come out of his balloon. One of the most appropriate bumper stickers I saw between the 2004 Iowa caucus and the November election said, “Dated Dean. Married Kerry.” I wonder if in four months we will see some similar stickers that fill in the names of this year’s rock star and establishment candidates, respectively. I sure hope not.

*Name that movie reference.

We have a loose and unwritten rule here at S&P that we generally don’t post things from screaming extremists who add little to intelligent discourse. This rule can be called the “Ann Coulter Rule,” but it also applies to the likes of Maureen Dowd, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, etc. But, I’m going to break that rule today, because I think Maureen Dowd has a great column today worth reading on “stealing” words in campaigns.(Subsequently, after I started writing this, I realized that another S&P blogger had recently written a great entry regarding Rush Limbaugh that was so well done no one noticed he had broken the Ann Coulter Rule.) Take a look at Dowd’s column, which appropriately points out how ridiculous Hillary and her minions like Wolfson sound when they scream and shout and jump up and down about Obama using Deval Patrick’s words in his speech.

I try not to hero worship, especially with politicians. I see no reason. With all of the build-up and hype surrounding any campaign, I tend to get either disgusted with or caught up in the hype. If I get caught up, I try to take a step back and ground myself. Politicians are only men and women, just like you and me. They are not gods, nor are they superhuman. So, while I have tentatively been supportive of Barack Obama’s campaign since my man John Edwards dropped out, I have held off from throwing my support behind him entirely, mainly because of the hype but also because of my belief that Hillary Clinton could do an excellent job as president.

With John McCain’s win in Florida, for the first time in around seven years, I am reminded of the amazing benefit of the electoral college and all that it has spawned in American politics - in particular the primary process that mirrors it. If it were not for the small rural states that began the primaries, we could have ended up with Rudy Giuliani in the White House.

When Giuliani decided on his “big state” strategy to win the Republican nomination, I was skeptical, yet nervous. I am not a fan of the overwhelming power that Iowa and New Hampshire hold in the presidential election process and think we need a change, but at the same time, I realize the benefit it provides in letting states that are not New York, California and Florida actually have a say in the election process.

If it were not for the state-by-state primary process, everything that is not a major coastal population center (including the Great Lake coasts), would get ignored almost entirely. For a while, I was worried that Giuliani had figured a way to outsmart the conventional wisdom of campaigning in the cornfields and living rooms and that the man who doesn’t include more to a sentence than a noun, a verb and 9/11 might actually end up winning the nomination. However, tonight, after the 2000 election when the electoral college elevated the Moron to the Oval Office, its little sister, the state-by-state primary starting with Iowa and New Hampshire has redeemed the process.

For full disclosure, I am a red state liberal who happens to prefer city life personally. I have spent around 4/5 of my life living in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi even though I now live in New York. So while I hated to see Bush lose the popular vote and win the White House in 2000, I understood why the process is the way it is - unlike Hillary Clinton and her shrill screeches against it in her first year in the Senate. Without the electoral college and the states’ primary process, the voices of Iowans and Nebraskans and Alabamians and others would be lost amid the glamor and glitz of New York and Los Angeles-based campaigns.

Now, with McCain’s win in Florida due to the momentum he built up winning in the great states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, maybe Giuliani can realize that all those people he ignored and didn’t care about in Iowa and New Hampshire actually do matter. If you want to be president of these United States, you can’t just understand life in the city; you also have to understand life in the country. This country is about more than New York and L.A. It’s about Omaha and Birmingham and Tulsa and Portsmouth and Cedar Rapids and thousands of other small cities and towns across the country.

Go back to New York, Rudy. The rest of the country doesn’t want you there either.

When Barack Obama’s supporter compared Bill Clinton to Lee Atwater, he could not have been more correct.

We have all known for years that Bill was a lacking in some areas of morality, so I don’t expect him to be a saint. He is also an astute politician, and so I understand that he has gotta do what he’s gotta do, but to see a former president get as nasty and dirty as he has during the campaign ahead of and after the South Carolina primary has really pissed me off. I was not aware that the so-called “first black president” was capable of stooping to levels below Karl Rove and pulling something that even Bob Corker would grimace at.

After campaigning heavily for weeks in South Carolina - a state where his wife led in the polls until the last month, Clinton managed to denigrate the state’s entire African American population to nothing more than a tribal community with a throw away comment saying essentially that Obama won South Carolina simply because he is black like Jesse Jackson. From it we can gather - without much reading between the lines - that Clinton is essentially saying “black people only vote for other black people if given the option, so we did the best we could.”

This is pretty low, and not something I would have expected from the guy who did more for the African American community since Lyndon Johnson (not that that is saying a lot at all, but at least he didn’t ignore them and jump start a campaign with the lingering white anger of the Civil Rights Movement). I guess it just goes to show: If you turn on Billary, you’re part of a conspiracy against them. Or, taking a page from the playbook of the only other family who has controlled America for the last 20 years, you’re either with them, or against them.

Just to clarify, I am not an Obama supporter, but an avowed Edwards supporter till the death. That said, with Bill Gates and Al Gore, I can’t think of any American who has done more for the benefit of the world in the last seven years than Bill Clinton through his Foundation. It’s a shame to see him sully the name of it by getting back into the pig pen of politics. I would hate to have to vote for John McCain only because the Clintons turned into race-baiters to win the nomination.

Does our president need to have experience before getting into office? Dubya was a two term governor, and look where that got us. On the other hand, Bill Clinton served as governor for even longer, and that wasn’t too bad. All the major candidates running now have very little experience, but is that such a bad thing? Are we better off or worse when we have someone who’s career has been molded by political jobs?

One of my favorite editorial writers, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, has written a fantastic column examining the previous experience of presidents passed. In it, he points out the relative lack of experience of some of the giants in American history - in particular, Abraham Lincoln. Now, a couple of weeks ago, another blogger on this board took some heat for comparing Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln, but it appears, Mike, that you have been vindicated by a writer with slightly more clout than the S&P staff.

It has gotten me thinking about experience more than I was before. What kind of experience do we need in a president? Would Chris Dodd and Joe Biden and Bill Richardson have been the best presidents in history? We will never know. Or, will someone like Obama or Hillary Clinton turn out to be the best in history? No matter what, we will never know since history will have to be the judge long after we are gone, but we can still speculate about it.

What kind of experience is the best for a president to have?

Huckabee is finished in his run for president. It may not be official yet, but with the Southern Baptist preacher’s loss in a South Carolina primary full of conservative Southern white Christians… he ain’t got nothin’.

Literally.

Not only does he not have the votes of what he has tried to form into his “base,” he also has no momentum, no money and no campaign organization to compete on the national level with giants like McCain and Ward Cleaver Romney. However, what Huckabee can say is that he energized the Christian conservative base like no one else has in this campaign (although that is not saying a lot), and this will likely win him a the number two spot on the ballot when McCain leaves Romney in the dust saying “Golly gee whiz! What happened?” and Giuliani… wait, who? Oh, nevermind…

McCain is a suspicious creature to the religious right, and his pandering to them went over about as well as his friendship with Bush. If he wants to shore up their support in November, McCain will have to run with someone with some more credibility on the Republican’s issues - God, guns and gays. Not only does Huckabee provide this, he also manages to do it while wooing the crap out of bleeding hearts like me, who rarely meet Baptists that seem trustworthy.

A McCain-Huckabee ticket hits all the right Rovian wedge issues on the head, but with a twist of compassion.

War on Terror? Check - Mac’s a war veteran and former prisoner of war that everyone respects.

Experience? Check - McCain’s been in Washington since Lincoln was shot.

Fresh face of change? Check - We’re not sure if Huckabee has even been anywhere in Washington besides Russert’s studio.

Hate-mongering religious issues? Check - Huckabee is a Southern Baptist, BUT he manages to take the GOP’s edge off these issues and make you realize he has actually put some deep soul-searching into them (AND, he supports the major aspects of Christianity that got dropped from the GOP platform because they didn’t meld well when the Sons of Confederate Veterans made a change and decided to leave the Dems and join the GOP). Double whammy - ridicu-liberals will continue to despise him for comments he made 15 years ago (no matter how irrelevant now), and moderate Christians will feel all warm and fuzzy inside about him.

All other wedge issues? Check - Huckabee is southern and white and Republican. No matter what he might have done with taxes as governor of Arkansas, those three qualities will turn enough good ol’ boy heads away from whoever the Dems run that it won’t matter.

You heard it here first. McCain-Huckabee versus… someone… in 2008.

Be sure to check back in July when I pry my foot out of my mouth.

Who would have thought it? Justice Clinton?

But, according to a recent article from CNN, legal theorists are surmising that a President Hillary Clinton might nominate her husband to a position on the Supreme Court!

Just less than three years ago, I took an April Fool’s joke from The Hotline and used it for my own evil purposes on this blog’s predecessor to convince another one of this blog’s writers that Bush was considering an nomination of Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court. At the time, we all got a good laugh out of it, but I don’t think we ever thought it would come up again - this time for real.

Personally, I wonder if Slick Willy could tone down the political animal in side him enough to serve well on the land’s top court, which (despite recent… and old… history) is supposed to be apolitical. On the other hand, he is one of the most astute minds in our nation, despite your opinions on his values and morals. The guy is brilliant, and he might just do a good job.

Thoughts?

OK, I know I have said in the past that Ron Paul adds nothing of any value to the intelligent discourse of the presidential race, but I have to recant that statement. After watching the ABC/Facebook debate tonight and watching that nutty backwoods conservative scream over and over about the Iraq War and the welfare state, I have to say, he’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch. I don’t know how much longer he can last, but I almost want to give money to his campaign to watch the fireworks continue.

On domestic issues, I am about as opposed to him as I can be. I think he is a moron to want to cut the federal government as much as he wants to (that’s not to say it couldn’t use a little trim here and there). However, on foreign policy, while I disagree with his isolationist stance as a whole, there are some good and sound messages in there that we should take to heart.

The rest of the field fell all over themselves to say that Al Queda didn’t attack us because we have bases in Muslim countries, while Ron Paul was man enough to say that was the main reason it happened. Of course, none of them were able to say that it could have been a combination of that and the values that we hold dear as a nation (which it of course is).

So, I recant. I hope Ron Paul hangs in there as long as he can.

Friday morning, there wasn’t a major paper in the country that did not have full coverage of the Iowa Caucuses on the front page. Even Friday’s financially-minded Wall Street Journal splashed Huckabee and Obama all over the top of its front page. All of the dailies did the same, both on paper and on their website. In fact, as I write this on Saturday afternoon, the websites for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, MSNBC all have residual news about Thursday’s Iowa caucuses and articles looking ahead to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primaries. Only CNN, of the major news websites, does not still have Iowa caucus news up. This is pretty amazing, since none of the major networks had live Iowa caucus coverage on Thursday night, and CSPAN apparently went on some quixotic campaign to show an entire caucus meeting from beginning to tedious end and make me realize I would rather be trapped in a room with Tom Tancredo and a truck load of illegal immigrants than sit through that mind-numbing process in person.

After unfortunately working late Thursday (all the while following news rolling in via Politico.com and Hotline on Call), I got home to find my wife watching The Apprentice on NBC. “Wha… where is the caucus coverage,” I asked as I dropped my bag to the floor. “CSPAN has some weird local thing on. So, I’m watching this,” she said. “What do you mean some weird local thing?” After she explained it to me, I asked about the networks. “That’s what this is,” she replied, making me realize how dumb a question I had just asked.

As you may have guessed, my wife and I don’t have cable. We don’t want to flush a ridiculous amount of money down the drain for 120 channels when we will only watch 12 of them. Until we can get an a la carte package, it will probably stay that way and we will keep enjoying our NetFlix subscription and get whatever comes through our building wiring (which we are pretty sure is not illegal, considering the cable guy came and set up our internet service and knows what channels come into the TV. Anyway, I digress…)

On caucus night, while every major print media outlet in the country was foaming at the mouth of their website over the Iowa caucuses, and I presume all of the cable media from what I have seen on their websites, NOT ONE OF THE MAJOR NETWORKS HAD LIVE COVERAGE! Instead, I had to battle with my wife over switching back and forth from sleaze like Desperate Housewives to the networks and CSPAN to see if ANYONE had any coverage besides what I was pulling up on my computer. I couldn’t believe it. And, what stunned me even more was that when the news finally came on, it was the local news that we saw – no national coverage until Nightline came on.

Luckily, I had my laptop and was able to keep up with everything, and when the time came, we watched Obama give his victory speech via the live Associated Press feed online. Then at some point CSPAN (which until that night had had great Iowa coverage) woke up and realized they needed to stop showing farmers argue about whether their county should include in its proposal to the state party platform whether the federal or state governments to regulate gay marriage, and they showed John Edwards’ speech.

How pathetically apathetic do the network executives think this country is? Do they not realize how badly Americans want to see someone else as president – if only in their imagination? Why else would voters have accepted the incredibly early beginnings of 2008 campaigns in 2007… er, 2006? Do they really think that TV watchers are so stupid that they don’t want to watch something more intelligent than Donald Trump firing a playmate?

ABC will partially make up for this tonight with its coverage of the New Hampshire debates, but it does not have any primary coverage on its schedule for Tuesday night. Neither do NBC or CBS. And, of course, ABC planned this debate for Saturday night, so who the hell will be home to watch it?